I feel that "if the social relevance of the topic warrants it" is not an argument university human subjects review panels can use to defend techniques that break laws and violate privacy. Although I try my best to support students and faculty doing socially relevant studies, I draw a red line when it comes to knowingly violating platform rules. I have watched this debate evolve for a decade and sought carefully to engineer compliance into our tools. Meanwhile, concerned academics are writing papers about the API lockdowns as if their own disregard for laws and norms (ex., the right to be forgotten) is not one of the root causes of the lockdowns. Not the sole cause, as there are strategic financial drivers impelling lockdowns, among other legal landmines. However, if you are one of the many thousands of academics sitting on spreadsheets of social data you have never checked for deletions before doing analysis and have no plans to delete all of that data at some point, I would suggest you are failing a basic test for ethical and legal research practices. While some well-funded research groups are working hard, for example, to use the compliance stream with stored Twitter data, the vast majority appear to treat stored social data as if it were the exactly the same as a stamp collection or a scrapbook of newspaper clippings you might store forever and claim complete ownership over. It is not. By pursuing research without the same level of ethical and legal compliance routinely required for interviews and focus groups (ex., we de-identify data, destroy the recordings, and delete the transcripts after the research is complete), the anarchic world of scraping, storing, and mining the personal data of millions of people mimics the very things we like the least about the platforms. Whilst we may deem our own research to be warranted irrespective of any or all laws and norms, anyone from any perspective could use that argument to study anything using any method, no matter how invasive, insensitive, or harmful to the research subjects. After a decade on Twitter as @stuartwshulman, I recently deleted my account. Many of you reading this post may have stored some Tweets I wrote about politics, sports, and growing garlic as well as my family, dogs, and close friends. Please be advised I request that you delete 100% of my Tweets from your databases. If you can comply and actually do so, good work, as you are well ahead of the curve. If you cannot or will not, you should report to the research compliance office at your university (especially in Europe) and explain why you cannot find and delete that data for me, and every other former Twitter user like me who may not have thought of using a listserv post to flag this issue related to my right to be forgotten. Dr. Stuart ShulmanU.S. Soccer Federation C-Licensed Coach Northampton High School Boys Varsity Coach On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 6:44 AM Bernhard Rieder <berno.rieder@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear colleagues,
I would like to disagree with Brooke here. Facebook data can still be accessed through non-scraping based API-access, most importantly the awesome Facepager.
For Instagram, scraping is indeed the go-to technique (instaloader works very well) and I would like to defend the idea that ToS should not hinder researchers if the social relevance of the topic warrants it. Adhering to corporate policy is not the gold standard for what independent research should strive for, in my view. Proposing topics to people at Facebook may be a strategy for certain topics, but for anything that does not fit within the narrow interests of the platform, this will most likely go nowhere.
For YouTube, you can also check out the YouTube Data Tools that I have been maintaining here: https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/
All the best, Bernhard
On 10 Nov 2020, at 05:22, Brooke Criswell via Air-L < air-l@listserv.aoir.org> wrote:
Facebook and Instagram are strict and according to terms and conditions they don't allow any data scraping.
Best try is to propose your study to a researcher at Facebook
On Mon, Nov 9, 2020, 2:21 AM Alexandre Leroux <alleroux@ulb.ac.be> wrote:
Facepager for FB and YT it has a user interface and a decent documentation.
There are scrappers for instagram but those don't comply with the platform terms of use and afaik are terminal only.
On 6/11/20 14:59, Cristina Migliaccio wrote:
Dear Colleagues,
Advance apologies if this question has been addressed (as I am certain it has been) in some previous forum/email---does an easy to use text/data mining software/platform exist that works across these 3 social media platforms: YouTube, Facebook & Instagram?
I would like to collect data on alphabetic features but also paralinguistic features such as likes, shares, etc.
Any suggestions whatsoever for a text/data mining beginner would be greatly appreciated (videos, lectures to this end also appreciated!)
Warm thanks- Cristina Migliaccio _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Alexandre Leroux Ph.D candidate Group for research on Ethnic Relations, Migrations and Equality (GERME) Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB) alleroux@ulb.ac.be _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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